Gifts

Wednesday 1 August / Day 3

This morning I took today’s edition down to Aunty Vi’s and Bev happened to come by with her dog Zorro. Bev has been letting me use her bicycle and Pete gave us tea and cake and we sat on the sea talking about sailing, business and activity around town—small talk but talk full of life about the state of things right now. Town chatter that makes me feel I can pretend to be a local.

Pete told me to get into his truck with him. I did and he just started driving out of Weymouth and up into the neighboring Dorset hills. I didn’t know where but he seemed to have an agenda, so I went with it. He pointed out tumuli at the top of a ridge and suddenly I was seeing them everywhere. This was genuinely thrilling for me—evidence of prior civilizations, many thousands of years old, in plain sight. Permanent scars on the landscape. They belonged in the project but not—I was happy to be experiencing them right now, in Pete’s truck, as a result of the work.

At this point Pete stopped the car abruptly at the side of the road and said he wanted to show me something. We started walking into dense woods and he told me that this was the forest (“Came Wood”) where American soldiers camped out in WWII before departing Weymouth and Portland for the Invasion of Normandy, 6 June 1944. A bit further in Pete showed me the ruins of a large anti-aircraft gun, the base rusting into the forest floor.

More remains, evidence of life beyond us, before us. Things left behind, no longer there. Not quite gone.

Later Pete stopped the car again, this time in an old military lot to show me the original stone for the town’s monument to the American D-Day soldiers, now laying on its side. The new monument stands on the Weymouth waterfront.

Back at the bakery, a conversation about geology, Mary Anning and evolution. Today’s edition (Weymouths Volume 3: Sense / Weymouth can refer to) features Google searches and tweets about both Weymouths, and one in particular triggered a conversation about the perception of Weymouth within the town and in the surrounding areas. Weymouth as a “far out” place—and how this works both in the town’s favor (to preserve certain aspects of local culture) and against it (as a way to isolate).

Mid-afternoon, b-side hosted a group of Dorset artists on a tour and I gave a casual talk about the project, and distributed today’s edition. There was great energy in the room and an appreciation for what I’m trying to do here. Encouraging and deeply satisfying.

At the end of the talk one of the artists told me that she used to know Aunty Vi and Pete when he was a child (below left). Juliet Harwood (right) gave me a CD of her choir’s music, the cover illustrated by fish embroidered by the choir—that’s hers at the front, leading the choir, and her husband at the tail, leading them up from behind.

I had a visit from Charlie at the very end of the day, just as I was about to leave. Charlie told me that “in the spirit of Weymouth,” she had brought me a book. She said that she wanted to select something as close as possible to the year of my birth, so she found this directory of all citizens and businesses in Weymouth and Portland from 1971, a sort of pocket yellow/white pages. Inside, she signed a beautiful old postcard with a harborside view of Weymouth, probably from around the same time, depicting a train that no longer runs there. Here’s that view today.

And that elderly man who interrupted my conversation with Jack at the Old Rooms Inn back in March—Charlie knows him well. Geoffrey’s stories about studying astrophysics at Princeton and becoming a double-don at Oxford in the 1960s are featured in volume one, so she’s sending him over to see. I’m grateful and not surprised that this connection was made—I had no way to get in touch with him. She says he’ll be deeply moved by it.

I’ve given away 60 books since Monday.

Again and again I introduce the project to people who immediately respond with their own life stories. The work is growing larger, far beyond what I can see. It’s larger than my own creative energy. Weymouths is about giving the work up—releasing it and letting it circulate into the community.

It’s an understatement to say that my witnessing this manifestation of connections and community here, as I distribute the work, is a privilege.

One Comment

It’s been fascinating to follow this, and read how your encounters and conversations build upon the work and extend it. I’m only beginning to understand how crucial this dialogical/performative/… aspect of the project is – just how much it’s not limited to books as objects. Thank you for sharing these thoughts and events as they unfold.